Civilian Airliners (AI Aircraft)

[enigma6584]

Yes, I know there are mods out there but it sure would be nice to have two or three AI Civilian airliners to populate all the International Airports we have on these gorgeous maps. 

[Dawgboy]

26 minutes ago, enigma6584 said:

Yes, I know there are mods out there but it sure would be nice to have two or three AI Civilian airliners to populate all the International Airports we have on these gorgeous maps. 

It would also be good to have them flying as neutral in airspace to sort and deconflict, in scenarios that would call for it.

[Northstar98]

8 minutes ago, Dawgboy said:

It would also be good to have them flying as neutral in airspace to sort and deconflict, in scenarios that would call for it.

 

Better yet would be a civilian 'faction'.

 

Though personally the whole way we do coalitions/sides could do with an overhaul - the system that C:MANO uses is perfect IMO.

 

But yes, +1, right now the only stock AI airliner is the Yak-40, a small, 3-engined regional jet.

[enigma6584]

4 hours ago, Dawgboy said:

It would also be good to have them flying as neutral in airspace to sort and deconflict, in scenarios that would call for it.

 

You actually can do that now.  In the mission editor, you have "neutral factions" which you can access and use them in your missions.  There is also a button now where you can designate the aircraft as "Civil Aircraft" but I'm not sure exactly what it does.  I think it makes the AWACs and or EWR radars basically ignore them in game and designate them as non-threatening.  But I'm unsure and am still experimenting.

 

The problem is we don't have actual AI civil aircraft to use in game like Boeing 737s, or Airbus 380s etc.  I don't want to continually use IL-76s as commercial aircraft and Yak-40s, it just gets immersion killing.  Yet we have all these numerous and beautiful civil airports we need to populate and have traffic going to and from.  It sure would make IFF a lot more important to the players in mission.  Know what you are shooting at, conduct proper IFF.  That IMHO would even add more fun and immersion to missions.

 

All we need is maybe 3 or 4 different types of civilian airliners.  That would do pretty good IMHO.

Edited July 3, 2021 by enigma6584

[Dawgboy]

20 minutes ago, enigma6584 said:

 

You actually can do that now.  In the mission editor, you have "neutral factions" which you can access and use them in your missions.  There is also a button now where you can designate the aircraft as "Civil Aircraft" but I'm not sure exactly what it does.  I think it makes the AWACs and or EWR radars basically ignore them in game and designate them as non-threatening.  But I'm unsure and am still experimenting.

 

The problem is we don't have actual AI civil aircraft to use in game like Boeing 737s, or Airbus 380s etc.  I don't want to continually use IL-76s as commercial aircraft and Yak-40s, it just gets immersion killing.  Yet we have all these numerous and beautiful civil airports we need to populate and have traffic going to and from.  It sure would make IFF a lot more important to the players in mission.  Know what you are shooting at, conduct proper IFF.  That IMHO would even add more fun and immersion to missions.

 

All we need is maybe 3 or 4 different types of civilian airliners.  That would do pretty good IMHO.

 

+1

[Exorcet]

23 minutes ago, enigma6584 said:

 

You actually can do that now.

 

It's pretty easy to set up a few civilian flight in DCS right now, but at the same time it can get pretty tedious if you want heavy air traffic.

 

I think something that might go hand in hand with airliner traffic (and also be useful for military stuff) is some kind of flight spawner object. You'd place it at an airport and give it a list things to spawn. For civil flights, give it a list for airliners, time between spawns, and a list of destinations (might need to link this to plane type so 747's don't try to land on dirt strips, etc) and once the mission starts it will just generate aircraft at the airport it was placed in.

 

 

On the military side you could do something similar, but also add tasks and targets to the list of parameters, for example Intercept, orbit, ground attack, etc. Targets might be trigger zones or other groups/units. This way you could automate the defense of airbases in a mission or just have a constant randomized stream of AI performing missions in the back ground without having to spend a lot of time adding flights in the ME.

 

[sirrah]

I like this idea @Exorcet

 

The ME evolved this far, at some point it would be great if we wouldn't need knowledge of scripting to simulate civil air traffic

 

As to the OP's request: Absolutely!

Currently all those eye candy international airports we have, look post apocalyptic 

[Tank50us]

such a spawner could also make QRF quiet viable as well, without having to fill a whole munch of slots and use complex scripting, which itself could be saved for actually attacking your specific faction. But these QRF spawners could mean that you can assign certain types of aircraft to QRF, and they scramble under the conditions you set. For example if a patrol gets attacked, the QRF spawns (or is already spawned just needing to power up, taxi, and depart), gets airborne, and heads directly to the patrol. Along with that, you can set that the QRF take off in waves and move to support the other waves as needed. This is especially true for carriers, which typically have aircraft on ready alert any time they're in a combat zone.

[Dahlbeck]

IIRC something like this was even available in Flanker 1.0, where you could place an aircraft with only a start/takeoff waypoint and mission type set as GAI (Ground Alert Intercept), whereby the sim would spawn and dispatch the interceptors upon detecting enemy aircraft.

I'm unsure whether this actually required EWR/AWACS/SAM radar systems to be placed on the map and detect the aircraft or if the AI "air defence chain" was as omniscient as the current one in DCS. I definitely remember reading in the manual about air defence integration and stuff.

It"s been a few years so I won't eat my hat if I'm wrong on this but...

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[FlankerKiller]

+1 for both civilian AI, and spawner objects. 

[Jagohu]

My single player campaign will contain all the major airways in the PG with the actual arrival/departure routes, airways, directions, navaids and traffic flying on them as white traffic with real callsigns, along with civilian ATC(including approach/departure/GCA/center+the default DCS tower) for both the white traffic and the player. The player will be able to set a performance value for his rig so for lower-end rigs we won't generate so many background traffic or they will only be generated near the player's predicted trajectory.

It's one hell of a lot of work, but I'll get there at some point. Here's a screenshot from a test run in TacView.

 

 

Same goes for marine traffic.

Any comments are welcome.

[makosch]

This awesome. Do you plan something like this for Caucasus. Will you release .miz Templates that we could use?

Edited August 11, 2021 by makosch

[Jagohu]

@makosch: thank you for the question.

 

Presently I'm trying to finish this one, as this is part of a rather large campaign, which is planned to bring a complete CSG deployment alive in DCS with the everyday operations reconstructed throughout the 4 months as much as possible from the available materials during OIF. It's aimed to be more realistic and thus sometimes probably not as exciting like when ie. there's a full-blown (imagined) war, but this campaign is modelled based on historical data down to the details which I dare say you haven't seen in a DCS campaign before. 

 

There are no .miz templates, all you see is LUA scripted, generated traffic, it's not like they are inside the .miz file and wait for activation. There's more than 2000 hours of work in it already, and there's a lot more to go before it's released but I hope sometime during next year it'll be possible. Even restarting the same mission will generate a somewhat different air situation picture as it'd be IRL, so players will always have to be on their toes.  Even the weather is going to be the same as it was on the same historical day (as much as DCS permits), based all on real meteorological reports - naturally this bit won't be random.

 

In the future I guess it could be adapted to other maps, we'll see. I'm thinking more of Syria as a next stop, if there will be one, but who knows maybe the Caucasus could be done too, I haven't looked into that yet.

[makosch]

Thanks for your lengthly explanation. I cant wait to give this a try once its released! Good luck 

[Rudel_chw]

On 8/10/2021 at 4:54 AM, Jagohu said:

Here's a screenshot from a test run in TacView.

 

Looks amazing, I will for sure try it out once you release it  .. are you making use of the CAM Mod for the civilian planes?

[Jagohu]

On 8/16/2021 at 5:36 PM, Rudel_chw said:

 

Looks amazing, I will for sure try it out once you release it  .. are you making use of the CAM Mod for the civilian planes?

Thanks, guys I'm happy that you like it so far

I need to check with ED if including the CAM or any other mod which adds extra aircraft  for the AI is allowed in payware campaigns at all, it all depends on that. If they are ok with it, it would increase realism very much and I'm all in favour of that

[Rudel_chw]

16 minutes ago, Jagohu said:

I need to check with ED if including the CAM or any other mod which adds extra aircraft  for the AI is allowed in payware campaigns at all

 

I highly doubt that it is allowed, as it would force the campaign purchasers to install that Mod 

[Revi]

I totally agree, i would love to have more civilian AI aircraft in the game! 

Currently i use the CAM (civilian aircraft mod) mod in combination with RAT (Random air traffic), to spice things up a bit, but it would be awesome to have this in the base game!

It would also open it up for more people, since most do not want, or do not know how to install mods.

[AbuMuqawama]

Civilian flights would be a wonderful thing to have to force the player to actually have to positively ID a contact and therefore give missions a realistic level of complication and risk for the player.

[AH6OY]

I've thought about trying it. You could attack and keep the civilian aircraft between you and the SAMs. Seems to be the thing for some around Syria.

 

One problem is if simulating a war start the civilian aircraft would have to have AI directions to clear the area. Then there's would all radio traffic be jammed already when the war starts. Ho hum.

[WobblyFlops]

The suspected issue at least from ED's perspective with this idea is that it allows people to create less than desirable content and that could have sensitive political connotations. Think about Youtube videos where people shoot down civilian airliners to propagate some kind of political goal, it could lead to some fairly negative press for DCS. 

Edited August 25, 2021 by WobblyFlops

[Rudel_chw]

12 minutes ago, WobblyFlops said:

The suspected issue at least from ED's perspective with this idea is that it allows people to create less than desirable content and connotations. 

 

Those people could already create such content using the CAM Mod, so that reason is pretty weak.

[WobblyFlops]

6 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

CAM Mod, so that reason is pretty weak.

But that's not official content. If it is provided by the publisher with their approval the PR hit is much bigger than if random people were making unofficial modifications. 

[ReyCandy]

hace 56 minutos, WobblyFlops dijo:

Think about Youtube videos where people shoot down civilian airliners to propagate some kind of political goal, it could lead to some fairly negative press for DCS. 

 

It has always been possible to create content in other civil aircraft simulators by doing outrageous things. However, doing that is in very bad taste and I don't think many people follow that kind of content.

[Jagohu]

Apparently this is the main issue of including mods as the CAM or MAM:

Quote

the issue with many mods is not all the assets used are legally allowed to be sold commercially. YOu can contact the mod creator and ask him if he owns all the models and such, but even then, he might not want it sold in a package with a campaign. 

Any suggestions are welcome as well as if anyone knows the creators of CAM/MAM so I could check it with them. Otherwise it'll have to be default DCS aircraft types - not that you'd see many of them visually anyways.

 

The issue of installing the mods is another question to be addressed.